


Over and Over

by Providentially_Demonic



Category: Mystery Skulls Animated
Genre: Angst, F/M, M/M, Multi, Pre-OT3, Vivi had serious magical memory issues, based on angsty headcanons, the noodle needs all the hugs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-24
Updated: 2016-05-24
Packaged: 2018-06-10 09:38:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6951142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Providentially_Demonic/pseuds/Providentially_Demonic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur is desperate to find Lewis, and to make Vivi remember what she forgot. </p><p>Takes place shortly after they have found Lewis and the cave was explained. </p><p>Fair warning: Angst and feels ahead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Over and Over

**Author's Note:**

> Written based on arthur-tristan-kingsmen‘s and my shared headcanon about Arthur trying to make Vivi remember Lewis.

Vivi curled into the warmth of Lewis’s chest, emotionally worn to a nub.

Arthur, shaken and crying, had retreated to the van, saying something about driving over to Lance’s when he could get his hands to stop shaking. He’d made a joke of it, but Vivi couldn’t bring herself to laugh. She’d asked him to stay, but he’d smiled, this thing of mixed happiness and tears, telling her that she needed time to put her head back together and remember what she and Lewis had meant to each other.

She had Lewis in her arms, still warm and solid and smelling softly of smoked peppers, just like he always had. So what if he no longer breathed, he was here and he was hers and for just one moment, all was right in the world.

She rested against Lewis on the couch, wrapped in her favorite blue blanket and listening to the solid triple beat of  Lewis’s anchor cradled in her hand. _Tha-THUD-thump, tha-THUD-thump._

She wondered idly why it didn’t sound like the normal lub la-lub of a human heart, but it was Lewis and he was solid and real and here and that was _everything_ that mattered. She thought she might cry if she hadn’t run out of tears.

Lewis just held her, and she sighed, mind working tiredly. All those memories he had taken from her; she was still finding the places they belonged. The inside of her head was like a jigsaw puzzle,slowly coming back together, with new pieces filling in the gaps she had barely been aware of.

She thought she must have drifted off to sleep when the soft rumble of Lewis’s voice vibrated through her. “What are those?”

Blearily, she lifted her head to follow his gaze. Resting on the coffee table was a pile of picture albums, the covers a soft yellowish-orange. They’d been there since Artie had gotten out of the hospital for the second time, his stump swathed in bandages after the surgery to insert the port and anchoring points for the mechanical prosthesis he was building. He’d been pale and in pain, and she’d all but brow-beaten Lance into letting him stay with her instead of being alone in the small house attached to the shop.

Lance had gruffly agreed and she’d had the feeling he’d been planning for it, for it had hardly been thirty minutes later when he’d shown up, bringing over a woozy Arthur, a small suitcase, and an overnight bag, with his medications and supplies for dressing changes tucked in the top. Arthur had been cradling a box with his single arm, holding onto it like it was the only thing keeping him upright.

He’d sat with her on the couch, face pale and pinched, but turning each page of the book resting across their laps to show her photos, telling her stories that at the time hadn’t made much sense, because she didn’t know the person he was telling her about. Arthur had patted her hand weakly, his amber eyes hard and determined. “We’ll find him,” he’d said. “We’ll find Lewis and you’ll remember everything, I swear.”

“Picture albums,” she whispered. “Arthur brought them over and told me stories of every picture, over and over, and _over again_ — when I couldn’t remember you. When I couldn’t even remember what he’d told me for more than a few days at the most.”

She picked one up, leaning back into Lewis’s arms, and opening it to show him the first page. Stroking her fingers softly over one picture, she lost herself in the new/old memory of Arthur telling her about it. It had been that first day, and his eyes were bright in spite of the haze of medication he was under. “This one, it was your first date, real one I mean, not just hanging out with him or both of us. He stuttered all the way through asking you to go out to the club with him. I remember, you were so excited to go out dancing and tackled him right across the table at Falco Pizzeria.” He chuckled softly. “This was at his place, his dad took this picture and this one. See how red he is? God, you knocked on the door and he tripped all over his own feet scrambling to open it. Nearly killed himself on the stairs. Never heard a grown man make such high, squeaky sounds!” His voice pitched up an octave. “ _‘Igotit,Igotit— Cayenne, no! Get away from the door!’_ ”

Arthur had leaned back then, his smile wide and melancholy.  “The look on his face when he opened the door and saw you standing there in that tight little black and blue number, and I knew right then he was as head over heels for you as you were for him. You were both so happy, laughing and practically dancing in place when Mr. Pepper took the picture of the both of you.”

 Her real memory of the event matched up with Arthur’s story, another fragmented piece of her mind falling back into place.

 Arthur...

 “I practically made him live here while he was recovering,” Vivi whispered. “I couldn’t let go of him, he was all that was anchoring me to everything when my memory was a shattered mess.” She pressed her cheek into Lewis’s shoulder. “I couldn’t remember you, my memory was like a sieve, practically nothing but holes, and every time he told me the story of one of these pictures I’d forget it so— so quickly.”

 “He’d only been out of the hospital the second time for a few weeks when he went back in for a checkup. For the surgery when they put the port and anchoring pins in his arm, y’know?” Vivi hiccuped and gave him a watery smile, scrubbing at her red, aching eyes with the heel of her hand. “I picked up one of the albums while he was gone... and not only could I not remember the story he’d told me just the night before— but I was looking right at a picture of you, a-and—” Her voice broke. “And I couldn’t remember _what_ you looked like!”

 She hiccuped again tearfully, the memory of that night filling her aching head. She’d pulled out the photo and held it, trying to remember and heart breaking because she couldn’t.

 Arthur had come home and found her in tears, curled into a small ball of misery at one end of the couch, photo crumpled in hands clenched so tight they ached. _‘I can’t remember what he_ **_looks like_ ** _, Arthur! I’m trying but he keeps slipping away…’_ she’d pled.

 Arthur, his own eyes shining with unshed tears, had gathered her close to him with his single arm, holding her tightly for a long moment before coaxing her into bed.

 “Artie s-started to t-tell me a story from one of the pictures every night, like some sort of bedtime story. Over and over, and start over again when I forgot it entirely by the end of the week— he said he’d tell me as many times as it took until we found you.” Vivi managed another weak, wavering smile. “He— he was so, so determined to find you. Kept telling me that when we found you, everything would be alright again.”

 She flipped a few more pages, idly now. “He was trying so very hard to help me remember you, reminding me everyday of things we had shared. The memory of him telling me the stories remained but the details got so fuzzy, that he had to keep repeating them over and over. Mystery figured out that it was a death magick quick enough, but there was nothing he could do to counteract it, and I couldn’t retain enough concentration to undo it, because every time I tried, I'd get a killer headache, same as if I tried too hard to remember you.” For a moment she wished Mystery were there, so she could run her fingers through his fur and soothe herself. But he’d gone with Arthur, practically glued to his hip on the way out the door.

 She trailed her fingers over the page, not really seeing it. “I _hated_ that I couldn’t remember. Hated it so much! Hated not knowing what else I was missing. I really hated seeing how much it hurt Artie when I couldn’t remember.” She shivered, a phantom chill crawling up her spine. “How much it hurt _him_ when I hurt...” Memories, this time blurred only by pain, filled her head, of trying too hard to recover the memories that should have been hers. She only failed, her mind rebelling; the backlash being a blinding pain in her skull, so great she would collapse where she stood. Of Arthur finding her that way and pulling her into his lap, wrapping his single arm around her until she stopped shaking, and then stroking her hair and humming softly under his breath until she could breathe again.

 She found herself humming the same tune, a lilting rise and fall of notes, hoping it would soothe the burgeoning ache of what felt like too many thoughts crammed into too small a brain.

 Lewis’s arms tightened around her almost reflexively. “You remember this song, _querida?”_

 She blinked up at him. “Only the tune. I loved it and Artie would hum it to me when I gave myself a migraine trying to recover my memories.”

 Lewis’s face crumpled and he buried his head in her shoulder. His voice wobbled. “I’ve hurt you both so much.” He made a sound that was so like a hitching breath and a sob that Vivi’s heart ached. Instinctively, she turned, rising up on her knees to cradle his head and shoulders against her chest. Lewis let out a low, soft keening sound.

 Vivi sucked in a breath at the desperate way his arms tightened around her waist. She stroked his spectral hair, soft and warm against her palm, and, hoping it would offer him the same comfort it had given her, began to hum.

 She startled when Lewis began to sing along softly to her tune. [ _“_ _I tried to write the perfect song— but every time I do— I feel like, it just comes out wrong— I've tried to find the perfect words— I'm still looking for the ones that you deserve—”_ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj_KXGyhSeo)

 His voice woke another memory, a glimpse of something that she should have known. “You sang this to me, didn’t you?”

 Lewis’s voice was quiet, barely a whisper. “Yes. The first time I sang it to you was when we all went out to sing karaoke. A-Arthur picked it and handed me the mic. I sang it directly to you and you... Later, when you asked me to sing it to you again, you said—”

 “It’s our song...” Vivi finished for him. She quelled a shiver, resting her cheek on the crown of Lewis’s head. “It was ours alone.”

 But it wasn’t, _was it?_ Arthur had picked the song, something he seldom did, simply singing along with her and Lewis’s choices, often taking on a falsetto, just to make them laugh. He had a beautiful singing voice, and used to sing softly along with whatever he was listening to when he worked on the van or other projects, but when had that stopped? Except when he hummed softly to ease her pain, she couldn’t remember hearing him sing at all since the cave, but even her faulty memory protested it had been before that.

 She suddenly remembered one incident. Without her memory of Lewis, it had made no sense, so she had dismissed it as a particularly vivid dream. The three of them had gone out to karaoke again. She’d remembered being there with Arthur but not Lewis, singing, though she now knew Lewis had been there too. They had begun a song that they had often sung in three-part harmony and waited for Artie to join with his part. Realizing too late that he wasn’t there; that there was silence where there should have been laughter and cheerful song.

 The aching emptiness had stopped them had stopped them both in mid-verse.

 Vivi had been so used to Arthur always being there, the sudden realization that he wasn’t had cut deep. Struck with an aching dread that hit her like lightning, she released Lewis and grabbed for one of the albums still on the table, this one with the music note embossed on the spine. Arthur had bought it because of how she liked to take pictures of them at karaoke.

 “Vivi?” Lewis questioned uncertainly, but she hushed him with a raised finger, flipping pages rapidly. The dread in her chest grew to a choking weight as each page only confirmed what she had already suspected.

 Fresh tears welled in her eyes and she choked on a sob. Five pages from the back of the book, she could no longer hold onto it and it slipped from numb fingers.

 Lewis caught it before it hit the floor. “Vivi?” His spectral eyes were filled with concern and the first hints of panic. “What is it?”

 Vivi flung herself back into his arms, shaking and caught between terror and anger. Terror at what she had noticed, and anger at herself for not noticing sooner, spotty memory or not! “Why didn’t I see it sooner!?” she raged at herself. “I don’t care if there were holes in my memory, all the signs were there!”

 “What? Vi, you’re not making sense!” Lewis pleaded.

 Her anger had overwhelmed the fear and she fastened her hand around one of the other photo albums, white-knuckled. She thrust it in Lewis’s face.  “Look at this and tell me what you see!”

 Concerned, Lewis took it from her grasp. While he turned his attention to it, she snatched up her phone and pulled up her gallery. Though she liked to have actual physical copies of her photos, she had some in her phone she had not had printed. She started scrolling back into the gallery, back past pictures of a pale, too-thin, and one-armed Arthur to a time before the cave. The contrast was stunning and proved her theory beyond doubt.

 Lewis had flipped a few pages but was watching her curiously. “What exactly am I looking for here?”

 Angrily she snatched the album from him, showing him a page close to the beginning, all three of them goofing around, Lewis holding a socket wrench out of Arthur’s reach and the lanky Arthur all but climbing the larger man like a tree to get it back. They were both laughing. Arthur rolling in the grass with Mystery, while Lewis cooked something on a charcoal grill, Vivi’s hand in the foreground giving Lewis a thumbs up that he was returning. A picture of all three of them together, Vivi squishing one to each side in an enormous hug; Lewis’s arm extending out of frame to indicate he was the one who took it. Arthur proudly holding up the rolling apparatus he had made for Galahad, Lewis standing behind him and holding the hamster. Mystery had both paws on Arthur’s leg, stretching up to sniff curiously at what the mechanic held. Vivi with an arm slung around Arthur’s neck, grinning, both of them damp and spattered with mud, an equally muddy Mystery yipping and bouncing around them.

 Vivi flipped a few more pages, stopping to point at one about a third of the way in. Lewis, with Vivi clinging to his neck, grinning as he held up a cake frosted in purple and blue with the orange lettering across the top proclaiming “Happy Anniversary, Mystery Skulls!” Lewis snoozing under a tree in the park, Mystery sprawled limply across his legs. Arthur was on the other side of the tree, typing furiously on his laptop, lips set in a frown of concentration, and paying no mind to the camera. Lewis and Vivi standing in front of a sign for the Winchester House, laughing and waving at the camera. Another candid shot of Lewis trying to tug a protesting Arthur into the frame. Vivi and Lewis, a sulking Arthur behind them, standing at the top of a sweeping staircase in a hotel commonly proclaimed one of the most haunted places in America. Vivi holding up a skull to show a shying Arthur, Lewis half out of frame and laughing.

 Another few pages. Vivi curled in Lewis’s lap showing him a map, gleefully pointing at something on it. Lewis smiling down at a sleeping Vivi, sprawled across the backseat of the van, Mystery belly-up beside her. Lewis indicating something out of camera range, Vivi beside him fiddling with one of the detectors Arthur had built for them, Arthur a blur in the back, his face turned away from the camera. Lewis sweeping a giggling Vivi up in a bearhug.

 More pages. Lewis. Vivi, Mystery. Arthur fading into the background or not in the pictures at all.

 More. Now if there was an Arthur in the photo, at best it was a blurry hand or the back of his head. Most of them he was not in at all. Just her and Lewis and occasionally Mystery.

 By the time she had gotten to the back of the book, she could see the same crushing realization filling Lewis’s face. “Wh-what—?”

 Vivi bit her lip so hard she drew blood, taking a deep breath to control her temper. All her tears were gone, chased away by anger at herself. “I noticed it, even when my memory was gone, but I put it out of my mind, because I was clinging to Arthur because he was what I remembered best. I asked him once, why I didn’t have more pictures of him, but he just shrugged it off. _‘We have more to worry about. As soon as I finish my prosthetic arm, we’re going out looking for him,’_ he’d say.”

 Lewis turned back to the first photo album, flipping a few pages. “He was pulling away from us,” he whispered sorrowfully. “He— we— when we started dating, he had to have felt—”

 “Like a third wheel,” she finished for him. “And—” She choked on her words, another missing piece of memory floating back up into place. “He didn’t know what we talked about just before the cave and you—”

 “I never had a chance to bring it up,” Lewis sighed. “By the time I’d worked up my nerve to start leading the conversation that way, we’d come to the c-cliff.”

 The memory clicked into place and Vivi’s felt her stomach twist; she covered her mouth, fighting down nausea. “Oh, god,” she moaned.

 “Vi?” Lewis grasped her shoulders, concern in his eyes.

 Vivi hunched over her stomach. “I-I couldn’t remember you,” she breathed. “But I remembered how much I cared for him. I didn’t remember _why_ I hadn’t acted on it; even with Arthur reminding me of you every night! I— I tried to come on to him. The look on his face—” she trailed off, swallowing. “So lost— so wretched. It was like he was emotionally wrecked. After that, he’d barely hug me except when I broke down trying to remember. He wouldn’t even let me kiss him on the cheek. He kept telling me over and over that we had to find you; that when you came back, I’d realize the truth of how I felt.” She choked out a broken laugh. “Wouldn’t let me argue with him either.”

 Leaning back against the arm of the couch, Vivi chuckled wetly, scrubbing at her eyes with one sleeve. “It was shortly after that— he decided we had to get back on the road, searching for you. His prosthetic arm was barely finished and his stump hadn’t even healed from the surgeries, but he kept insisting he could recover just as well on the road.

 “I’d gone to work that day. He packed up the van all by himself, loaded up Mystery and came to the Tome Tomb to get me. Duet took one look at him and didn’t even argue. Said to come back when we were ready and clocked me out.” She hiccuped and scooted back into Lewis’s arms. “Within the hour, we were on the road. He’d made a map of places to look for you, mostly caves.”

 Lewis sighed into her hair, his arms tightening around her.

 “We kept going, no matter what. Arthur wouldn’t give up, every place we checked without finding you, it hurt him a little more. He barely slept, but he refused to stop searching. And every night when we stopped, whether we were camping out in the van or had rented a hotel room for the night, he kept telling me those same stories over and over, like he was as desperate for me to remember as he was to find you.”

 Lewis brushed his fingers over his heart, the locket that had held all her memories of him. It’s color was dulled, faded, even though the crack in it was healed. “We need to talk to him, _querida._ We have to—” He paused, as if searching for words. “To make him understand.”

Vivi nodded. “We’ll go over there in the morning. It’s time for us to be together, all of us, the way we’re supposed to be.” And if Arthur wouldn’t believe them when they told him, by god, she was going to keep repeating it until he did. Over and over and _over again,_ just like he’d done.


End file.
